Finished Project: Flowery Wall-hanging

Wall-Hanging a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

I have the most insipid names for the things I make. Well, I suppose that's because I just don't name anything, so I always default to basic description. This is a wall-hanging with flowers on it and too many flowery prints, so flowery wall-hanging. A baby quilt that's pink? Pink baby quilt. I don't like to label my quilts, and don't, so I can't see any sense in giving names to them either. I tend to think of my projects by certain names - the origami quilt, the brown quilt-along, the reflection one - but I don't think they're art that'll someday be catalogued, you know? If, 200 years from now, some quilt historian finds the slightly tattered remains of this wall-hanging... I don't mind if it's called WH200129-94 with no name, creator, or date attached to it.

Anyway, yes. A wall-hanging that is flowery. I made this in the fall/winter of 2010, for my mom, but didn't actually get it finished until early in January. (My photo is dated January 6.) I bought it as a kit (for a table-runner, which I made square rather than long) because the colours seemed like they might match my mom's upstairs. I don't know if it matches as I've not been back home since I sent it off to her, but it seemed like it might work. There's a lot that I don't really like about this project - the fabrics, the colours, the style, etc. It's certainly not to my tastes, but when it comes to gifts, it's best not to please yourself, anyway, right?

Anyway, it's hard to tell in the photo, but there are buttons on the center of each flower, to help tie in the black thread I used to stitch down the appliquéd flowers. I quilted it using a kind of beige coloured thread, mainly straight line quilting around the outsides of things (kind of rounded-ish around the flowers) and then echoing the shape of the blocks.

This was the first project I ever made where I did the binding entirely myself. Normally I pass my quilts off to my mom for the binding, but it was for her, so it was time I learned to do it myself, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out. I've come to enjoy the binding process. Not so much stitching it on to begin with, but hand-stitching it down around the back. It's satisfying to do.